"Can the entire distribution of scholastic aptitude be accounted for by just one general factor?"

Seriously? I mean: seriously? Are we really debating indexes (as in "statistics") and whether they are meaningful? Whoa. Way to go, folks. Words fail me. And here I thought, at least scientists would get the idea of abstracting a complex construct into a single metric.

Other than the bare physical layer, you will want to think about restoring and reusing the data at some point in the future when the software used to generate the data is no longer available. What good is a RAID 5 of a couple Gigs of data when you can't use it? Or don't know what the data actually meant?

I don't know if it's just in Information Retrieval or also in other branches of CS, but in IR journals are less prestigious than conferences. So, your first try, in general, is submitting it at a conference. You have to pay admittance to the conference, but I haven't had to waive my copyright yet.

Plagiarism in academics is not a legal problem, but an ethical one. And the tool of choice is a publication. If you can prove that a given text fragment is yours because it first appeared in your paper, then every uncredited quotation will be frowned upon. Nobody checks "the copyright" for this even today. If you use a colleagues text in your paper without properly giving credit for it, that's bad even without an IP lawyer being involved.

I guess the problem is you still have to buy the paper. I don't get the copyright-claim fear cited in TFS, either. For me, it's the idea of having to pay a publisher with tax-money to get access to a paper that one's own government has already paid for, what is ridiculous.